


The Residue of Design

by Zigadenus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Christmas, F/M, Holidays, Light Angst, Marauders' Era, Post-Deathly Hallows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-13 06:31:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12978126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigadenus/pseuds/Zigadenus
Summary: Severus Snape didn't give many gifts.  'Gift' is just another word for obligation, or at least that's what he's learned in Slytherin House.  But maybe it's a synonym for 'apology', too?  Written in response toThe Unwanted Gift, a holiday illustration by the amazingMyWitch.  Aspects of this are somewhat dark. Complete in five chapters and an epilogue.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MyWitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyWitch/gifts).
  * Inspired by [25 Days of Drawing - 2017](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12881826) by [MyWitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyWitch/pseuds/MyWitch). 



> The title of this piece derives from a quote attributed to the English poet John Milton: “Luck is the residue of opportunity and design.” I’ve written this in response to a beautiful piece of artwork produced by the extremely talented MyWitch, whose [‘25 Days of Drawing’](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12881826/chapters/29426487) are pure delight.

_Eo animo quidque debetur quo datur, nec quantum sit sed a quali profectum voluntate perpenditur._

_(The spirit in which a thing is given determines that in which the debt is acknowledged; _or_ it's the intention, not the face-value of the gift, that's weighed.)_

-Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger)

 

He raises his arm to swipe with the back of his hand, again, at the greasy strand of hair that insists on falling into his eyes.  The scents of brewing and his unbathed body waft up from his robes.  He needs a shower in the worst way -- it’s been the better part of a week -- but there just hasn’t been _time_.  Classes had let out Wednesday noon, and he’d been huddled over this cauldron ever since.  It’s been almost a year and a half getting it to this stage, and be damned if mere hygiene is going to interfere with its completion.

A real alchemist would have teams of brewers to coddle along a complex potion like this.  They’d work in shifts, go home to a good dinner and a long soak for sore back muscles, instead of subsisting on stale coffee, lukewarm tea, and the occasional cigarette when he can spare a moment to stand and stretch.  He doesn’t smoke often.  The smell bothers him, and he very literally cannot afford to make a habit of it, but Avery had tossed him the tail end of a pack, mute thanks for not dobbing him in to McGonagall over the Transfig cheat sheet that had been circling the seventh-year dorm.  If his clothing has a whiff of tobacco about it once in a while, Avery is assured that his offering has been accepted, and that Snape will keep his quiet.  And the nicotine helps to subdue the tremors in his hands; too much caffeine with too little sleep has made his fingers prone to disobey orders. 

He’d hit on the combination of caffeine and nicotine months ago.  Usually, he applies a bit of _Nicotiana_ oil to his gumline.  The taste is gawdawful, but mucosal membrane uptake is eminently more effective than inhaling it alongside tar and particulates.  But he’d run out of it last weekend, and there hasn’t been time to raid the greenhouses again, let alone set up a distillation.  He stubs out his last fag, and dumps another dram of wit-sharpening potion into the remainder of his tea.  It disrupts the oily sheen on the surface; he swirls it, and the colours kaleidoscope.  He squeezes his eyes closed to dispel the image, and feels his center of balance tipping forward. 

No.  He can sleep later, when things are alright again.  He needs to set up his filtration apparatus now, because the miniscule volume of liquid in his cauldron is finally beginning to take on a golden hue. 

He lowers the gas, carefully, and has a moment of blind panic when he can’t find the filter paper.  Damn it, he’d left it—have the house elves been in?  No, he’s been here for days, he must have moved it.  There!  Beneath his lab manual (which needs updating; he’d left off the notes somewhere early this morning, once he’d set up the oxygen-excluding dome over the mouth of the cauldron). 

But alright, disaster averted.  He carefully places two round circles of acid-free paper into the base of his Büchnel filter, and checks that the stasis charm on the ice bath is still holding.  The timer dings; he cancels the charm, pulls on his dragonhide gloves, and settles the cauldron into the tray of ice.  Steam billows up.  “ _Infrigida_ ,” he mutters, tapping the ice bath with his wand.  The meltwater begins to reassemble into spiky crystals around the still-steaming cauldron.  Surely this is taking too long?  He checks the timer.  No, it’s only been twenty seconds.  Forty in which to breathe, and get control of the jittery flutter in his stomach.  Plenty of time.

There isn’t, though.  The conjunctivus curse Black had nailed him with two weeks ago had slowed up operations considerably.  He’d lost two days, or – as he calculates it – three meals and at least one night of blessed sleep.  He rubs at his eyes, in what he firmly tells himself is memory of the painful, itchy scratching of the curse, and not exhaustion.  His face feels numb.  He scrapes his teeth over his lower lip, but even that pain doesn’t really improve his grasp on consciousness.

The timer dings again, and he heaves himself up from the desktop he’s sitting on. 

The small cauldron seems so heavy.  He watches, almost detached, as tendons in his arms jerk and spasm as he slowly drains the cauldron’s contents across the filter paper.  Heavy clumps of leaden crystals accrete along the pan of the filter, as the glowing golden liquid trickles down, drop by precious drop, into the tiny flask clamped beneath it.  It’s been nearly eighteen months, and what he has to show for everything is only a couple mouthfuls worth of this potion.

Two swallows, maybe three.  It doesn’t look like much, compared to having to grovel and beg second-hand school-things off Cissy Black -- Malfoy, now -- given he’d squandered his miniscule budget on ingredients for this potion, two school years running.  It doesn’t look like much, compared to the sleepless nights he’d spent in this chilly, dusty classroom.  It doesn’t look like much, compared to the things he’d had to do as favours for his housemates, to ensure their continued disinterest, and their silence should Sluggy begin wondering where some of the dungeon’s paraphernalia have disappeared to.  It doesn’t look like much, compared to what it’s intended to atone for.

It’s an apology, wrapped in months of penance.  It’s an offering, enclosed within an admission of the reality that has fallen between them.  It’s a gift, but he doesn’t want or expect anything in the way of reciprocation.  It’s his wishes and hopes, for her, for them.  Because he thinks the nights might press a little softer, if he can think of her happy, and know that there is no undertone of ill-will towards himself.  So alright, he does want something in return: he wants to know that she does not truly despise him.  He doesn’t go so far as to hope for anything more than neutrality, but even a lack of loathing would be something precious.  So it’s a plea for forgiveness, inside of which is concealed his fragile optimism, which he holds like a shield against the loneliness and despair that daily dogs his heels.

It’s _Felix Felicis_.

He stoppers the flask and tucks it into a nest of crinkled gold paper, in a plain cardboard box.  He settles the lid in place, palms his wand again, and concentrates hard.  The same spell that had accomplished the paper sends a burst of scarlet washing over the box.  He sags, tired but pleased, into the chair behind the desk.  It’s a proper, cheerful, Christmassy sort of red.  It’s just right.  She has a cloak in exactly the same shade, just a touch darker than the Gryffindor crimson of her scarf. 

He checks that his hands are clean, before he attempts the ribbon.  He’d had to ask the house elves to supply it; he’s pants at transfiguring cloth, and a silk ribbon is no exception.  He should take the time to learn, now that he’s done with this project.  It’s lucky he hasn’t gained any more height – without Cissy to lengthen his robes, he’d have been a sorry sight, this past year.  They’re getting worn, though, and he’d singed his right sleeve back in October.  His mind hadn’t been on what he was doing, that day in Potions.  Slughorn had looked as if he might’ve been about to say something scathing, but Potter and his crew had beat him to it.

He shakes the memory away, and carefully tucks the ends of the ribbon beneath the golden bow he’s constructed atop the box.  It’s perfect.  He’s become quite good at them; Cissy always insisted upon hand-wrapping her gifts, but she wasn’t particular about whose hands did it.  And he’d always owed her favours.  Although he did sometimes think that she probably wracked her brains, to come up with enough menial and vaguely humiliating ways for him to compensate her casual charities.  Her last year, she’d often defaulted to waving him off with the promise that he’d owe her, later.

He supposes she probably kept a running tally.  He certainly did.  It is fairly alarming how little of his debt he’s paid; he wonders if any of it transferred to Lucius, once they’d wed.  He is a bit frightened of Lucius Malfoy.  Early impressions cut deep, and scarred.  He does not want to owe Lucius Malfoy favours; he’d run his arse off, licked Malfoy’s boots his entire first year, because he’d been very sure that it was a bad idea to be in that particular wizard’s debt.   And if Malfoy’s amusement with him had saved him a beating or two at the other boys’ hands, well… He wasn’t about to complain.  It was enough strain to be on guard against Potty and his gang; he didn’t need enemies in his own trenches.

But it seems he has them, regardless.

It’s when he’s stashing the wrapped gift in his trunk that he realizes someone has made off with his bath caddy again.  It’s a pathetic, juvenile prank, barely worth his attention compared to the things Potter and Black scheme up.  But it’s another hassle that he doesn’t need, more malevolent accompaniment to the bleak threnody of his existence within these cold stone walls.  He grabs some pants and his other set of robes, thankfully clean, and drags his tired carcass out to the common room.

It’s that miserable shit Macnair again, no doubt.  He’d become a problem since he’d hit a growth spurt in fourth year, and it’s beyond the pale that as a sixth he’s taken to attacking seventh-year students – even if the seventh-year in question _is_ one Severus Snape.  Something needs to be done about Macnair; he wonders who might owe him favours.  Since he started on the _Felix_ , he’s not been that good about keeping his housemates in his debt.  “Snapey’s slipping” he’d heard Avery say, early last month.  It’s a problem he’ll need to be more diligent in rectifying, but for the moment, he only wants his toiletries back.  He’s expecting Cissy, at least, to gift him another book for Christmas, but he doesn’t want to have to resell it to buy _soap_ , of all things.  And besides, that’s a week off, and he needs a shower _today_.  Right now, or he’ll miss his chance.

“Right, whichever of you stole my bath things – turn them over, or I swear I’ll make you regret it.”  It’s a gauche threat, overblown and aimless, and he realises the risk in it, even as the words leave his lips.  He should have led by accusing Macnair directly, if he was going to make a scene.  This way, it will seem to them that he doesn’t know where the blame should be apportioned.  Dangerous, that.  It sets him up as an outsider again.  And Cissy’d worked so hard to help him shore up the position he does have.  Or had.  Hell, he’s barely even been in the common room, this past term.  Who knows what vitriol and poison have been circulating?  He glares at the indolent oafs lounging in front of the fireplace.  “Macnair, I know you’ve done it.”

“Do you now?  Tell you what, you suck my cock, I’ll give your rubber ducky back, hey?”  He and his cronies snigger as if this is the height of cleverness.

He is fingering his wand, and wondering how much bloodshed would get him detention with Slughorn, when Avery notices. 

“Oy, Snape.  Fuck off, it’s too early in the morning for a firefight.”

He clenches his teeth, and scowls bitterly in Avery’s direction.  Betrayal.  Well, one betrayal should beget another, that’s the natural order of things.  But Avery’s fast with his wand, and he acknowledges that it’s only cantankerous threads of sheer willpower that are keeping him upright at this point.  Another time.

He turns to the door.

“That’s right, you poncey little slimeball, you bloody well obey when your man lays down the law!  And bring me a sarny on your way back, daaaarling.” Macnair’s in fine form today.  “Sure you don’t want to suck me off, sweetheart, you’ve got nice girly lips for it!”

He wonders, not for the first time, what their obsession is with genitalia.  It’s crude; maybe that’s the point. 

He does the best he can in the showers.  At least there’s bar soap, gritty brown stuff that smells a bit like Toby’s Brylcreem had.  His hair feels sticky, even after he’s washed the suds out.  Maybe it’ll dry alright.  Optimism, again.  No toothbrush, but he scrubs at his teeth with the tail of a towel, gargles with tap water, and hopes against hope that he has a mint stashed somewhere in his trunk.  Avery knows a breath-freshening spell, but he’s not about to ask him.  Nothing’s free in Slytherin House, and he hasn’t any desire to engage in the sort of compensation Avery would ask of him.  Despite what Macnair and his lot think.

He cradles the wrapped gift in his arm, and disillusions himself to pass through the common room again.  They’ll know someone’s there, but it’s basic decency not to pry when someone doesn’t want to reveal themselves.  Nott’s still shagging that Hufflepuff, as far as he knows, but no one’s ever caught her leaving yet, as a matter of courtesy.  He scans the assembled Slytherins on his way past.  Regulus Black is still there, who always goes home regardless, so he knows he hasn’t missed the carriages yet.  Macnair’s braying laugh rings out.  Fuckwit.  He’ll have to bend his mind to that problem rather sooner than later, because he doesn’t know how much longer he can hold up under increasing aggression. 

He’s so tired.

But if he can make things right again, if he can only know, deep in his bones, that there is one person alive for whom he is not an object of disgust or loathing… If only.  Just one.

He closes his eyes, leans against the rough stone along the dark staircase.  The damp mineral smell of it calms him, eases the lump in his throat.  He will be alright.  He fucking has to be, because he’s about to run the Gryffindor gauntlet and he needs his tattered wits about him.  He doesn’t have a plan, and that’s always a terrible position to be in, when there’s any risk of altercation with Potter. 

He tightens the disillusionment spell about his person, strengthens it again.  His brain is rebelling at complicated tasks like this, but he only needs to hold it in place long enough to shove this gift into Evans’ hands, or slide it across the table to her in the Great Hall.  It’s safest that way.  He doesn’t need her to see him; she’ll know who it’s from, when she opens it.

He’s too late.  The Gryffindor table is already emptying, and he sees Pettigrew and the werewolf cramming their schoolbags with the remainder of the toast.  Damn it.  He curses, his mouth silently forming the words.  Damn Macnair, and damn Avery too.  Damn the lot of them. 

Perhaps they’ve only left to fetch their luggage – if he waits at the steps, where they’ll have to pass on their way to the carriages?  That might work. 

No time for a cloak.  He trots down to the entrance, forcing himself out into the frigid morning air.  Across the causeway, through the arches.

Oh hell, they’re already ahead of him.  Potter’s levitating Evans’ trunk for her, while she leans on his arm, and rises to say something private in his ear.  They’re descending the stairs, to where the carriages are waiting in an orderly queue, and there’s nothing else for it.

“Evans!  Evans, wait up!”  He rushes forward, hope and despair warring in his breast, as she pauses, turns, and scowls at seemingly empty air.

Has she recognized his voice, is that what’s prompted the scowl?  Potter’s done, that much is certain.  The wretched cunt takes aim with his wand, but Snape’s lucky, the spell glances off the stairs just in front of him.  Haha, he’s missed, the stupid bastard.

No he hasn’t.

He feels his feet fly out from beneath him, and there is sudden glancing pain throughout his body as his momentum sweeps him down the stairs.  He collapses in a puddle at Evans’ feet, dignity and disillusionment spell in shreds.

He sits up, horrified, but experiences the next moments in a flood of relief: his fall hasn’t crushed the gift.  He is almost giddy with this unlooked for scrap of luck.  Despite the sharp, horrible pain centered in his tailbone, a bright grin breaks across his face as he gazes up into Lily’s leaf-green eyes.  “Here, Evans, this – it’s for you!” he says, all unwary of the stormclouds building along her brow.

She makes no move to accept the gift he proffers.  “Why would I want _anything_ from the likes of _you_?”

“Please.  Please, Lily, just take it, don’t make a scene,” he whispers, begs, thrusting the bright package up into her unwilling hands.

“Don’t make a scene, you say?  Don’t make a scene!  You’ve some nerve, Severus Snape!  You think I owe you anything?  You think there’s anything you could ever do to make up for being the pathetic filth you are?  You’re nothing but rubbish, Snape!”  She punctuates each of these phrases by viciously ripping at the careful bow, clawing through the packaging.  A piece of gold paper wafts down from the dismembered box, and her fingers on the flask are white, like the rage that tightens her lips.  “Stay the hell away from me, and I won’t tell you so again!”

She winds her arm back, and the little flask arcs from her fingertips, flashing in the cold morning sunlight. 

He turns to watch its trajectory with the weight of inevitability pressing hard and black in his stomach. 

It strikes a step in a burst of glass and liquid gold, the scattering droplets flaring bright as they dilute in ice and snow.

When he fights through his disbelief, his dismay, and is finally able to turn back to her, she has gone.  “I only wanted to wish you luck.”  His whispered words float away in a breath of icy fog.  He watches her grip Potter’s arm, watches the lot of them pile, laughing, into a waiting carriage.  Macnair gives him a solid kick in the ribs as he and the Parkinson boys head to their own holidays.  He cannot bring himself to care, much.  He cannot bring himself to stand up, even.  Defense or retaliation is more effort than he can even conceive of mustering; the necessary energy is completely beyond him.

The carriages roll down the lane, accompanied by the joyous ringing tones of the carillon.

Snow begins to fall. 

He can feel it melting where it settles on his hair; little trickles of cold water snaking down to his scalp.  The icy chill of the stone step has begun to numb the pain in his tailbone.  A sullen gust of wind whips the golden bow back against his robes.

He closes his eyes, and wonders, vaguely, if his tears might freeze them shut.

He is just so tired.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MyWitch, girl, _I'm soooorrrrrry!_ This is so totally unlike anything you probably had in mind (see message on LJ, please!). *irons hands*

You need authority to accomplish change. 

It’s not the first lesson he’s learned as an educator, nor, he suspects, will it be the last. But it is the most bitter.

Oh, he’d entertained fleeting fantasies that donning his new professorial robes would lend him gravitas, or that once he was standing behind the lectern, he’d be immune to their casual barbs and their calculated cruelties. This is hardly the case. He is just expected to pretend harder, now. They are children, he is informed. 

He went to school with nearly half of them. 

And they have good memories, albeit not when it comes to the subject he is required to drill into their thick heads. …Good memories, or maybe it’s that they have older relatives. Occam’s razor, and all.

Regardless, there have been plenty of these lessons, but they are not teaching him much, except alerting him to places where unreasonable optimism still clings in the crevices of his mind. He has no doubt any lingering strands of it will be exterminated eventually. He will stop being surprised by these things, once he ceases to manufacture daydreams in which he plays any part more illustrious than that of Sisyphus. Although, frankly, he doesn’t think he’d accomplished quite so much clever trickery, nor reaped so many earthly rewards, before Zeus had sorted _him_ out.

Looked at from the perspective of mythos, it is no wonder things didn’t work out. He should’ve been beseeching a life of Persephone, not wasting his time with Zeus and Thanatos. But who might Persephone have been, in this tangled metaphor? He has no idea. Perhaps as literary aspirations go, he will stick to scurrilous limericks.

 _There once was a lad from Cokeworth,_  
_Whom it was wise to give a wide berth_  
_He got his best mate slabbed_  
_‘Cos he heard things and blabbed_  
_Now she’s sleeping beneath frozen earth._

That is… somewhat less than scurrilous. And inaccurate, too. He hadn’t been any friend of hers. She’d made that abundantly clear. 

Hallowe’en extinguished a lot of cherished fantasies. There will be no further meetings of the Order of the Phoenix, in which he might yet be afforded the opportunity to attend, that he might smirk mysteriously in the face of her astonishment at his cleverness and bravery in turning spy for her cause. He will never be able to assure her that she was wrong about him.

Because she wasn’t, really.

But he’s nearly castrated of his damnable optimism now, so surely there is little further harm he can perpetrate. After all, what is ambition without optimism? Is there even such a thing? He feels, vaguely, as if the Head of Slytherin House ought to know the answer to a question like that. He would be hard-pressed to characterize any of his current activities as ambitious. Altruistic, maybe, in an over-arching sense. If there is no hope left for him, if he is only to labour fruitlessly, the least he can do is to ensure that precious few have opportunity to follow his foolish footsteps.

But you need authority to accomplish change.

Really, the best – the only! – worthwhile thing he’s done was to give Filch permission to haul members of his house into detention if they failed to spell the mud from their shoes. It is a little enough thing; he’d barely given it any thought, unlike the complicated system of disciplinary reforms he’d laboured hours over, leading up to the September staff meeting. He’d seen old Argus with his mop and bucket, and felt bad for the poor sod. Whether he was a squib, as Snape secretly hypothesized, or just preferred menial labour as some complicated method by which to stave off the boredom of his job (Snape could sympathize, if this were the case), it seemed to too closely parallel the futility of Snape’s own existence when he’d watched the thoughtless little bastards come trekking in off the pitch without even wiping their shoes. 

So Slytherin House is now very good about ensuring that their shoes are clean.

Their noses, less-so.

But they’ve been subdued, the past couple months. Everyone is on excellent behaviour, which practically screams their guilt. Whether personal or associational, he has little interest in determining. They’re children, he snidely reminds Sprout, who made the mistake of darkly wondering in his hearing whether it might not be better to drown the lot of them in the lake. Well, tempers had been running high. Jubilation mixed with sorrow mixed with alcohol mixed with frustration that so many of the Death Eaters had gotten off on the flimsiest of excuses… He knows they think he’s no exception to that, so he mostly holds his tongue like the rest of Slytherin does. 

They’ll eat shit, deserving or not, and smile while they do it.

Or he’ll have something to say about it.

With all the authority he can muster.

It’s good fortune that they’re a sensible and pragmatic lot, for the most part, and he has not had to test this. Because he is keenly aware that were he tasked with imposing anything at all upon them, he would fail quite spectacularly. He does not fail to imagine that they are minutely aware of how little time he spent in Azkaban (although it was plenty, from his perspective). It is going to be a long slog, to convince them that he is only clever, and not genuinely duplicitous. He needs their willing participation in that interpretation of reality. Some days he does not care. Most days. But it is not really that much extra effort to work at shoring up their estimation of him, to coddle them a little. And it’s only turnabout, so his sense of justice isn’t much tasked. If Sprout hands Miss Mulciber a detention for ‘cheating’, well, he’ll look the other way when someone hexes the Ravenclaw who’d planted the purported evidence. And taking a few extra points off Gryffindor once in a while? If they’re bitter, then they ought to exercise more care.

They are doing so today, although he is under no illusions that it’s his own presence that is enforcing order and good behaviour, as they sort themselves into carriages. He hadn’t really expected anyone to agree with him, when he’d floated the idea in the staff room last week. “I’m sure the prefects will keep order,” Flitwick had opined from behind his pile of marking. “That’s why we _have_ them, you know.” But McGonagall, surprisingly, had agreed to stand out here in the cold with him. Granted, she is mostly calling out tidings of the season to her favourites as they pass down the stairs, but her presence has staved off at least one altercation between his adders and her lions. He’d seen their eyes flicking between the two of them. So he’s accomplished a second thing, by proxy at least.

“Severus?” She has asked him a question.

“Sorry, woolgathering.”

“I asked, are you going home for the holiday?”

What is there at home? He almost laughs, as he considers the barren hole that he is the nominal master of. “No.” It comes out more curtly than is probably polite. “Are you?” he asks, to soften the blow.

“Not this year. I’ve half a dozen Gryffindors staying over. The war.”

Always the war. They are all chained by it.

“Mine are mostly with family connexions.” _Mine._ He does not particularly want ownership of them, but he has it, so he must make an effort to remind her that they are not unscathed. There are victims all around.

“That’s good. Family and friendship will stabilize things, eventually.”

He is somewhat relieved that she has not bristled up at his remark. Maybe he is getting better at fishing appropriate comments out of the chaotic morass that is his brain. She doesn’t attempt further conversation, though, so… maybe he committed an error after all. He runs it back in his mind, tries to look at it from different directions. Mentally shrugs. Who knows?

He gives up on the endeavour, and glances back. He’d been looking to see if the dawdlers were any closer to sorting themselves out, but what he sees instead are the stairs. Sees a sunlight flash of gold, sees the ruin of his hopes. Would it have made a difference? Other than the ritual significance of the day, she couldn’t have known he was coming for them, wouldn’t have known to have _Felix Felicis_ on her tongue. It’s all an odds game, and the odds are long. And irrelevant, since that’s not the way it happened, and there was never a chance she’d have had the potion in her possession.

The carriages depart, wheels churning and groaning through the mounds of soft snow that fell in the night. “Well!” McGonagall gives him a cheerful smile. “Let’s see about a spot of tea, then, shall we?”

Her smile fades, and her brows contract in a bit, as he takes too long to answer her with his excuse, “I’ve marking to get started on, but you’re right, it’s rather frigid out here.”

She pats at his shoulder. “You’ll take some time to unwind over the holidays, I hope?”

No one _ever_ touches him. Not like that. He doesn’t flinch, but it’s a near thing. “I—I suppose so.”

“You should, you know. You’re running yourself ragged.”

Ah, charity. Well, he is done with the charity of Gryffindors, done seeing anything other than self-righteous pity in it. They mount the steps in silence. He wants to lengthen his stride, to outpace her and flee back to his dungeons. He doesn’t.

They stamp their boots free of snow in the entrance hall. She begins to tuck her mittens into a pocket on the inside of her cloak, but stops to extract something wrapped in a serviette. “Here, Severus,” she says, pressing it into his hands. “If I can’t entice you to join me for a cuppa, you can at least take some biscuits to tide you through your marking.”

He flips the corner of the cloth over, and grimaces uncertainly at the things sitting there. There are two of them, heavy biscuits shaped like some kind of lizards, with little details picked out in hard candy frosting. 

“Ginger newts,” she says, as if he has asked a question. “You eat them. Have fun with your papers.” She sweeps off in the direction of the staff room, while he cautiously breaks off one of the legs, and brings it to his lips.

He rations the remainder out, just a taste every night before bed. He carefully does not examine this ritual in his waking hours, does not respond with anything more than professional civility and his excuses when McGonagall extends some remark or offer in his direction.

“Come now, Severus! It’s Christmas Eve, we’re having eggnog and presents; surely you’re not going to beg off that!” 

He damned well will. But she’s not to be dissuaded, and he finds himself chivied into the staff room. Before long he has a discreet view of the fireplace and a mug of brandied cider clasped between his tense fingers. This is going to be terrible.

Zeus had a hand in the gifts, apparently. Although maybe it is more apt to call him Hermes, because he is up to tricks. Every parcel has a riddle about it, and there is much raucous merriment as the other teachers take turns guessing for whom each package is intended. He huddles into his chair, in mute horror at the proceedings. There cannot possibly be any good-natured ribbing on his own horizon. He doesn’t know if it will be worse to have his riddle met with gales of spiteful chortles, or with silence.

But he needn’t have worried over it: There is no gift for him. 

He is the only one who notices.

Dumbledore’s offerings dealt with, the scene devolves to more personal exchanges. He watches McGonagall unwrapping a fine shawl, a bottle of scotch, a handsome wooden chess set.

He imagines nicking the seams in her robes with his slicing spell. _Careful_ , he will purr in the cold air. Because of course he would do this where no one is apt to intervene. Maybe not on the steps, though. That is nowhere near the right emotional register for this. At the edge of the Forbidden Forest, instead, where Potter and Black had— At the edge of the forest, where the trees sigh beneath their blankets of snow, and crackles of bursting xylem are barely audible behind the chatter of her teeth. _Careful, you wouldn’t want to get cut._ As if she would be bringing it upon herself. Careful, Snape, or we’ll have to hurt you. 

What kind of undergarments might she wear? Something starchy and matronly, a stay and garters? She’d pull her arms across her chest to ward against the harsh wind that whips the snow across her ankles. She’d have long woollen stockings; he’s seen them beneath the edge of her robes when she crosses her ankles. They’d have to go. He’d unclip her garters, and the stockings would sag down her legs. Not terribly attractive, but then neither is he. That’s the point. 

Off with her shoes, and now she’s standing there, bare legs turning red in the chill, nipples peaking the cloth of her brassiere. He’ll step forward, tuck her wand back in her hand, wrap her trembling fingers around its handle, as he reaches, with his off hand, to unpin the strict knot of her long black hair. _I think you’ll want a warming charm._ He is himself indifferent. She’ll be warm enough for the parts of himself he intends to expose. 

She could hex him now but she doesn’t. Her toes are wet with melted snow, when he runs his hands over the bottoms of her feet, lifts her legs to his shoulders. _I did not know that lionesses kept manes as well._ She’ll laugh, and arch her hips in invitation. It’s too cold to smell her properly, but he bends close for a taste, at least. Her skin is hot. He’ll lean his face against the smooth expanse of her thigh, enjoying the warmth the way he might bask before a fireplace. 

And she’s glowing like an ember, everything centred there at that little node of nerves. He’ll lap at her with his tongue, like licking the icing from the edge of one of those biscuits. And he’ll feel her fingers in his hair; she’ll thrust her pelvis, hard, up against the cartilage of his nose. When he enters her at last, she’ll hiss his name, she’ll buck and writhe beneath him, she’ll wrap those legs around his hips, and heave herself up onto his cock. As he feels his balls tighten up, he’ll lean close, above her, and whisper into her ear. _Finite incantatem._ She’ll be shivering hard, with every muscle of her body, the sheath of her cunt in spasm around him, as he drains himself into her.

His cock hasn’t even twitched. At most, he feels a defeated kind of revulsion. He is staring pensively into the fireplace now. He knows there is no one here save Dumbledore who can see into the mind’s eye, and he knows that even Dumbledore could never observe something he chose not to offer up. But he cannot look at them, in their festivity and cheer.

He does not belong here. He is too dark a thing for all this glittery gaiety. He sets his cooling mug aside; rises, slips out the door. No one seems to mark his departure. It is just as well.

Dark things belong down in dungeons, with the mildew and the spidery flowers of calcite that vein the ceilings, where moisture seeps through the stone. He shucks out of his robes, pulls his nightshirt over his head, and settles beneath the cold sheets. Stares up at the mineral blooms. Tries to imagine, again, how it might feel to be inside a woman, to have his shaft enveloped by slick heat. Runs the palm of his hand along his flaccid length.

His hands are cold.

He rolls over in bed, opens the drawer of his bedside table. Extracts the last bit of ginger newt. It’s a tail. He places it on his tongue.

_You disgust me._

The sugary morsel dissolves in his saliva, notes of molasses, pepper, and ginger flooding his tastebuds.

Fair enough. He disgusts himself, too.


	3. Chapter 3

The wind is plucking at his clothing, clawing at his hair. He thinks he can hear a faint mournful keening in the distance; maybe it’s the wind howling up in the silent carillon. Whatever it is, fantasy or phenomenon, it’s not Albus Dumbledore’s ghost; he’s certain of that much. After all, he’s kept his word better than he’d ever imagined he might. His performance review should be exemplary. 

It’s the heavy sky that’s breeding this caustic humour, no doubt. The gray morning light is more than dull, it’s practically malevolent. He tucks his fingers a little deeper in the confines of his cloak. A second longer to snatch at his wand, that way, but at least he wouldn’t drop the damn thing outright. Not that there seems to be any call for it. Times past, he’d cajoled the staff to circulate with him and head off last-minute pranks and fisticuffs; this year, it’s the bloody staff he’s here to keep tabs on. Fucking Carrows.

It’s not even that they’re wretched evil fucks. It’s that they’re _stupid_ wretched evil fucks.

He sighs. Watches the students slinking past with their luggage. Wonders if even half of them will be back in January. He has his doubts.

Wonders, too, how many of them can see the thestrals now.

It’s only after a violent death that you can see them. He doesn’t know why. Perhaps it’s just a proximity thing; maybe the scent of violence clings to you. Sometimes they navigate towards prey by following the stink of dark magic, he’s pretty sure. So maybe being able to see them is evolutionary adaptation: run, you daft git.

He presses his lips together. Stares at the beast that has been calmly regarding him from where it is hitched to the nearest carriage. Not today, friend. Not today.

He’d read somewhere (or Cissy had told him, maybe) that in the big battles, back in the goblin wars and the like, field medics would keep an eye out for thestrals. They liked to start on the bodies that were still alive. So you could use them as a crude kind of triage system. 

A good quick _Avada_ , that’s the way he’d like to go. Or poison, but he doesn’t see that as a possibility, given the promises he’d made. So a quick burst of green light, maybe from behind, even, so he can’t see it coming. That’d be alright. 

Not left bleeding out somewhere, fodder for these ugly things. Although he supposes they can’t help being ugly. It’s just what they are. Still, he doesn’t want them opening up his belly while he might still have his senses about him. Doesn’t want to hear them crunching into the long bones of his legs. And what if, in the afterlife, you carry with you the wounds you sustained alive? Take Sir Nicholas, for example. He doesn’t want to drag his half-gnawed limbs about him for eternity.

He’d like to go the way Lily had. That was a clean death, if nothing else.

The thestral tosses its head. He gets the sense that it’s offering its disagreement – that it has marked him out for later.

Fuck. His mind is spinning all sorts of paranoid nonsense these days. He needs to sleep more. There are potions; he should take them. He can’t expect to intervene in every situation, can’t be held accountable for every damn thing that’s going to hell around this school. That’s what the staff are for. The real staff, not these gormless fuckwits.

He motions for the Carrows to precede him back to the castle. Draws a deep, bracing breath of icy air. Right. He has work to do, because Potter & Co. are not about to advertise their whereabouts in _The Prophet_ , are they?

He is so very tired that the word does not even begin to convey it anymore.

Hardened snow and ice squeaks and crunches beneath his boots, as he slowly climbs the stairs.

He thinks back, for the first time in ages, to the very first year he’d stood this self-imposed holiday duty. Fuck, but he’d been a dunderhead: who in their right mind wanted more work? And what good had it ever done? What good had anything?

He wishes he’d saved a piece of one of those ginger newts. Hoarded it against a day when the sorrow pressed heavy like these clouds, when one little scrap of sweetness might have been enough encouragement to rekindle the tiny flame of hope he’d never truly realised was burning away in his heart – never realised, until it had died.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _...I keep trying to write some happier Christmas for him, but you know? His life fricking sucked. But stick with me through to the end, please!_


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I shall hope that this chapter earns me a little forgiveness for perpetrating the last one upon you -- er, except you MyWitch, I expect you will not enjoy this (I remember how you feel about necks and their anatomy)._

She supposes that at least some of the thestrals must be from Hogwarts’ tame herd.  But you can’t tell them apart from the wild ones, and there are surely some of those around tonight.  The school does not have nearly so many as she sees lurking in the twisting shadows cast by the dying light of fiendfyre.  She tightens her grip on her wand.  She’ll stun them if she has to, but a stinging hex might be enough to drive them off.

They set the hair crinkling at the back of her neck.  It’s not their fault.  They just do.

Christ, the willow’s practically demolished.  A few of its lower branches try to bat feebly at her as she approaches, but with its trunk torn open in a mass of splayed wood fibers, she knows it’s only a matter of time before it dries out or rots.  The tunnel beneath it hasn’t sustained much damage at all, she’s thankful to see.  She’d feared it would be unnavigable. 

She can smell the blood, but nothing else.  When people die, their sphincters relax, she has very recently learned.  It’s a relief, honestly, to find he hadn’t eaten anything in a while. 

What a horrible fucking place to die.  She looks at the broken furniture, at the ribbons of wallpaper that curl down from the claw-marks Lupin had dug into them, decades ago.  She looks at his supine body.  She supposes it is marginally better than having been torn to pieces at the age of fifteen; he'd had time to get some sort of life in, anyway.  It is not dignified, though, and he deserves that much, at the very least. 

She reaches down, to lift his wand away from his lifeless fingers.  She intends to levitate his corpse and convey him to where they are washing the bodies in the Great Hall.  It’s never a good idea to cast a spell on a wand, so she can’t leave it on him.  Nor does she think it’s right to leave it here.  A wizard should be buried with his wand, she knows that much about their funerary customs.

She doesn’t believe it, at first.  She has to touch his face to convince herself.

His skin is still warm.

It’s been _hours_. 

But it is.  Still warm.

She nearly backs away in panic, nearly begins to scream for Harry, for Ron.  For anyone.  Because she doesn’t know what to do.

No, she does.  If there’s any chance – and now that she’s looking, she isn’t sure there is.  Maybe it’s… No, she isn’t going to waste time theorizing.  There’s no breath escaping his lips, his chest doesn’t move.  There’s no blood seeping from the brutal punctures at his neck.  His eyes are hideously glassy.  But his skin is warm.  And if there’s any chance at all, she is close to being the person least-equipped to accomplish anything.

She tucks his wand in her back pocket, and, hands shaking, extends her own.  He floats up like a feather.  Wingardium leviosa, she thinks, with an unhinged mental chuckle. 

Pomfrey.  She needs to find Pomfrey.  She’ll worry then how to convince the matron to waste precious moments on Severus Snape.  Maybe she’ll be lucky enough to find Harry along the way; he can do the talking.

The thestrals begin to stalk her by the lake.  She can hear their wings rustling, and every time she whirls back to look, they’re a little closer.  Her wand is occupied keeping Professor Snape aloft… Oh!  But she has his in her pocket – it’d be worth a try.  The stinging hex holds them back, but not far.  His wand won’t allow her to channel her usual energy levels.  What do they want?

Flesh, she thinks, and shudders.  She hopes someone’s accounted for Colin Creevey.  She’d seen him fall, but no one had brought his body into the Hall when she’d left.  She hopes, too, that someone – who? – will have seen to the Death Eaters.  If only because she does not want to have to see what remains of them once the thestrals have fed.

They fall back as she’s approaching the castle.  Parts of it are still burning.  She tastes the greasy smoke in the air, and wonders wildly how much of it is Crabbe.

“You, girl!  Where the fucking hell are you taking that body?” The commanding voice is so imperative that she skids to a full stop, at the base of the stairs.  “Is that Snape?”

“Yes,” she answers before thinking.  She pivots, trying to track the woman’s voice.  It can only be the bedraggled blonde clutching at her side and running towards her.  Narcissa Malfoy.  God, where’s Ron?  Where’s anyone?  She needs someone to hold her off, needs to get Professor Snape to help.

“Put him down this instant!  Nimue’s cunt, I’ve only been looking all over the grounds for him the past half hour!”

She is so gobsmacked by this casual profanity and the evident relief in the Malfoy woman’s face, that she actually complies, and lowers his body to the ground.  “I don’t think he’s dead.”  It falls out of her mouth, completely bypassing the Filter of Good Sense.

“Well he’d better not be!  I exerted uncharacteristically serious effort crafting that full-body stasis spell.  Stress cortisol levels or blood loss reach a certain threshold, and it’s supposed to kick in like a charm.  Like a charm, get it?” she sniggers and begins to slice Professor Snape’s blood-sodden clothing away.  “Doesn’t do a damn thing for crush injuries or _Avada_ , but it’d be nice to see it pay off in one instance; maybe I’ll get to write it up, if it’s not Azkaban.”

“I wonder if he took his antivenin on schedule?” Malfoy mutters, as she digs through a leather case at her hip, which had been concealed in the fall of her robes.  She is extracting linens and vials of potions, tourniquets and dressings, syringes and needles, dangerously precise little blades that glitter wickedly in the flickering light.  “Probably best to top him up.  Did you see when that boy cut that filthy snake’s head off?  Were you there?  That was glorious, wasn’t it?  I’m going to pensieve that, watch it again and again.”

She senses that Narcissa Malfoy is someone who likes to hear herself talk, because she does not pause in this patter for any response.  But while her lips have been moving, so have her hands.  She draws up a volume of straw-coloured liquid, and assesses it against the fiery glow above them.  “Couldn’t give us some light, could you?”

She conjures up a glowing ball, charms it into stasis above them.  The mess that is or was Professor Snape looks so much worse now that she can see clearly.

But Malfoy never even pauses, just pulls his arm straight, and injects the potion – the antivenin?  The Death Eaters have an antivenin?  Well of course they must: they were around Nagini long enough, maybe ‘accidents’ tended to happen.  “And let’s have some Replenishing Serum in the other, then, shall we?”  Her tone is nearly gay, and she claps her hands together.  “Circulation time, darling!”

It takes a moment for Hermione’s brain to catch up, and to understand what the other witch means to do.

“But the arteries in his throat are torn out,” she cries.  The blonde woman only rolls her eyes at her, and completes the flourish of her wand anyway.  Hermione gapes in horror as the blood begins to steadily trickle once more from his wounded neck.

“Honestly, are you some kind of idiot?  It’s not spurting – if it’s an artery, it’d be spraying with each cardiac contraction.  External jugular, no doubt about it.  Be useful, press your fingers here – no, a little lower, there’s a communicating branch with the internal, just behind the angle of the jaw.  We want the blood to go someplace that’s not all over my field of view.”

“How—how do you know this?”

“Well, I’m only a bloody Healer, aren’t I?  Not _everyone_ decides they’d enjoy being puked over by toddlers in the Mungo’s ER, as a reward for completing five gruelling years of training.  Now shut up while I work.”

Malfoy – Mrs. Malfoy – swipes her wand across her hands.  They glow briefly, a curiously electric cyan.  She reaches for one of those wicked little knives, scalpels, Hermione supposes, and sets to work.  “Hold here, press hard into the clavicle.”  Beyond these commands, she’s ceased talking.  Her focus is entirely riveted upon the puzzle of tissues that her blade lays free before her.  Hermione doesn’t think she’s even breathing, so still is everything except the tip of the scalpel.

“It’s always veins.  Why is it always veins?  I bloody hate veins.” 

Is that what it is, the mangled thing she’s exposed?  It must be.  Hermione can see blood pooling in the site, escaping from the torn edges.  She presses harder.

“Good, keep that up a few more minutes.”  Mrs. Malfoy has her wand in hand again, and strands of purple light begin to dart into the bloody mess.  “I hate opening like that, but if I can’t see what I’m doing I can’t very well fix it, can I?  Watch, he’ll go septic like Macnair nearly did.  Bacteria everywhere, but what do you do.  ‘Though I do think that batch of antimicrobial tonic he sent me for Walden might not have been quite up to snuff.  One hopes the Hogwarts stores will be in better order.”  Her tone is sour, but her words are easy now, and the wound is closing in on itself. 

“Well that’s the worst of it done, I hope.  This other one’s just a flesh wound, see here?  You can stick a swab straight through it, look, right out the back.  No trouble there, we’ll pack it and keep an eye on it.  Clean it up with maggots in a few days if it necrotizes at all.”  She heaves a great sigh, and rolls her shoulders.

“Let’s see about brain damage, shall we?” she positions the tip of her wand in the centre of his forehead.  “ _Ennervate_ ,” she whispers. 

Professor Snape’s eyelids flutter slightly, and close again, as if he’s reluctant to wake from a particularly good dream.  When his eyelids finally rise, Hermione can see that his left pupil is blown, and both eyes wander, unfocussed.  Mrs. Malfoy gazes at him critically, and presses her thumbs over his eyelids, drawing them down.  His lips move, slightly.  A strand of Malfoy’s hair flutters, caught in the faint breeze of his breath. 

He is breathing.

Somehow this is the confirmation that means more to her than anything else.  She rocks back on her heels, and stares at his blood: on her hands, and where it has soaked into her sleeves.  So much blood.  How much does a human body even contain?  Or is that an irrelevant figure?  Mrs. Malfoy is injecting another round of Replenishing Serum into the vein in his arm.

But it’s a long way from over.  They labour over his body for hours; Mrs. Malfoy teaches her how to find the median cubital vein, and later, how to inject relaxants into the gluteal muscles without nicking a nerve.  Giving him any potions by mouth is clearly out of the question, although Mrs. Malfoy confirms that cellular uptake would be higher for some of them, if they could be administered that way.

He slips away from them once, and Mrs. Malfoy directs her to pinch off his nostrils and blow her breath into his mouth.  It is good that she is distracted with this task, and does not clearly see how the other witch landmarks his chest.  What she sees are only glimpses of Mrs. Malfoy’s elegant fingers digging in at the furrows between his ribs.  But she does see her haul off with her arm, and stab a dirty great needle right between the parallel knuckles of two fingers.  His body jerks, a galvanic twitch that interrupts the embrace of Hermione’s lips over his. 

But it’s alright, because he’s breathing again.  She was right, earlier: breathing is the important thing after all, probably.

No one has come looking for her during this time.  She’s alarmed to find that the moon has set, that it is nearly morning.  Where are Harry and Ron?  Grieving, she supposes.  She pushes thoughts of Fred away, admonishes herself not to think of Lupin and Tonks.  Instead, she moistens one of the linens with a quick _Aguamenti_ charm, and moves to wipe some of the dried blood from Professor Snape’s face and torso.  She doesn’t want to ask Mrs. Malfoy if it is a very bad thing that he has not regained anything like consciousness.  She suspects she knows the answer.

But as she’s wiping the blood from his naked chest, she sees his eyelids flickering.  “Mrs. Malfoy!” she calls, low but urgent.  The older woman gets up, from where she is sitting on the steps.

“Oh, that’s a lucky sign!  Helloooo, Severus, are you with us yet?”

His lips move, and finally a whisper emerges from between them.  “Cissy.”

“Right here.  Do you know where you are?”  Mrs. Malfoy cradles his face between her hands, her thumbs working a gentle caress over his sharp cheekbones.

“So tired…”

“I know.” 

But it wasn’t an observation or a complaint.  He continues his sentence after a long, painful breath: “…of being in your debt.”

Mrs. Malfoy’s hands fall away from his face, and her lips are twisted into an incredulous, half-helpless smile.  Hermione can see, in the rosy light of the dawn, that there are tears tracking down through the grime on her face.  “Severus Snape, you are the most remarkably dimwitted genius I’ve ever encountered.  You don’t owe your friends debts, you great ninny.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _One more to go. For real, this time._


	5. Chapter 5

Potter’s jaw is hanging open. It is a terribly unattractive expression, though it might have been nice to see it on his father’s face, once. What did they expect? He’d met the carriages every other time they’d returned from break. Not that a war was much of a break, but it’s January all the same. “Mr. Potter, it is far too cold to catch flies.”

“We didn’t expect—why are you here? Professor Snape. Sir.” 

Oh, but wonders never cease. He is tempted to smirk, long and coldly, at the fact that Potter appears to have finally learned his title, and some courtesy. It only took his utter humiliation, it only took his near-death. “I suppose it’s the Headmistress’ privilege to delegate tasks to staff members with more time on their hands than she has.”

Potter sways awkwardly in the face of this reminder of his prior poor showing. No, I have not forgotten, Mr. Potter. And you will have to work much harder at convincing me that you are not the same self-aggrandizing, hapless, guileful, careless, unthinking dullard you’ve long demonstrated yourself to be. But he doesn’t say any of this, just presses his lips into a thin, tight smile and narrows his eyes.

Potter’s shoulders hunch, and he bites back whatever he’d been about to say.

You don’t own me, Potter. Not now, not ever again. “Is that the lot of you, then?” It’s rhetorical, he can see that the Granger girl is only now retrieving her cat carrier from atop the carriage; he taps his foot impatiently against the step, as she encourages her familiar into these confines. Poor cat; he thinks he knows how it feels. He is looking up at his own prison, so he does not see her approach.

“Professor Snape! Oh, sir, it’s so good to see you!”

He turns back to her, slowly, and gives her a look down his nose. “Likewise, I’m sure.” His tone conveys the opposite, but it doesn’t have the effect it ought to.

“We’re not… not really in school here, are we?”

“You are not, Miss Granger. You are attending to your accelerated coursework, which will be a feat utterly beyond _most of you_ , I have no doubt, and you are sitting your NEWTS in all haste.”

“So…”

He sighs. What is she after? She’s not really his student anymore, but he probably still should not hex her: Cissy had pointed at her picture in _The Prophet_ , and identified her as the unknown girl whom she’d used as an extra pair of hands, that night.

“So you’re technically not our teacher then, sir. Er, what I mean is, you won’t, erm, deduct points or give us detentions.”

Right, excellent, spell it out for the crowd. He is about to tell her that he will find a way to wreak complete and profound misery upon them if they put so much as a single toe out of line, when she darts forward and flings her arms about his torso. 

“Oh sir, it’s so very good to see you upright and breathing!”

She releases him before he can prod his brain cells into working order, laughs as if startled, and dashes up the stairs to the castle, luggage and yowling cat in tow. 

He glares at the remaining students, who are as flummoxed by this odd behaviour as he is, apparently. “Well, are we standing here all afternoon?” This gets them moving, and soon he will be back to his lab bench. Or a bottle of something, because fuck it, it’s his birthday, and maybe he can start this year off the way he means to continue: unconscious as often as possible.

As often as possible turns out to be not very. He is spared the task of cramming a year’s worth of curriculum into their leaden skulls, but this does not mean that he is free. No one is free. It’s a penitentiary, after all: Hogwarts School of Perpetual Toil. There are endless repairs that the ministry has no time or personnel to see to; when he’s done all he can to help there, there are stores to be replenished in the infirmary. It keeps him busy. So much so that he barely notices when they leave – he is ordering supplies, and trying to make some sense of Horace’s lackadaisical tally system. If he thought it had been abstruse and nonsensical nearly twenty years ago, well, time did not improve things. He wishes, vaguely, that he’d taken a look at this disaster earlier – he could have asked McGonagall to bring all the students back, and the whole lot of them could repeat a year properly.

He solves the problem with exams and remedial coursework, extended labs and metric tons of essays… and if they complain that he’s a vicious bastard, it matters not a whit to him. It’s just getting things back on even footing, and they’re all happier for it in the long run, he’s sure.

But things can’t stay the same, can’t go back the way they were. How were they? He doesn’t even know anymore. He seems to recall that there was a time he could walk into the staff room, without being met by a barrage of pitying looks, or lips curled in disgust. He is an object of ridicule to them. It was nicer to be invisible, unnoticed. He did not realise how fortunate he was. He avoids them as much as possible. 

Things cannot go back.

Flitwick retires five years after they resume. 

McGonagall calls a staff meeting, and insists he attend. Cons him into it, really, because if he’d known she was going to force cake and champagne upon them all, he’d have stayed bent over his Veritaserum. Which is probably exactly why she didn’t tell him. 

He is so sick of her overtures of friendship, exhausted by endlessly telling her, It’s fine, really, it was an act on my part, you couldn’t know. He doesn’t know how much of that is true anymore. Maybe all of it, maybe none. Oh, her interpretation of his role might’ve been wrong, but did he fundamentally act a different person – _was_ it a role he played? Or did it hurt so badly because they could not see him, could not see that he was just the same?

Things cannot go back. Or he cannot go back. Because whoever he might have been, perhaps he never was.

He hunches down into his customary chair, and sets the slice of cake and champagne flute aside; lepers do not break bread with those who are whole. Tunes out the remarks about Filius’ years of service, the accolades, and the fond stories they tell of his time as Head. Offers only a token resistance to Filius’ suggestion as to his successor. He doesn’t care, really. For show, he remarks snidely that it’s about time, when Minerva follows this up by admitting she is finally giving in to the Board’s increasingly persuasive suggestion that she too find a replacement – it’s not that she is biased, as Headmistress, educator, and housemaster, but she is overworked, and they can all see it. In the edge of her temper, if not her energy levels.

And maybe her temper is why he’s been charged with meeting them, as they return to the school. He watches the carriage creak up the drive, the thestrals snapping their beaks. It rained, earlier. The petrichor still hangs in the air, although he can hear the bees droning once more. Droning away like the new Transfig and Charms mistresses do, as he levitates their luggage down from atop the carriage. It’s an empty courtesy, nothing more, but they thank him as if he has performed some great favour. If they are going to be so fresh and wide-eyed when the students arrive in a couple months, they’ll be eaten alive, he wants to tell them.

But maybe they know that. The Granger girl, at least, has a sober expression on her face, as she edges past the thestral in its traces. Professor Granger. He must get used to this, he supposes. Or leave.

“Sorry,” she says, “I know it’s silly, but I really can’t abide them.”

Oh. So not good sense on her features after all. Well, but he can agree with her, on this subject at least. “They are… too clever to be wholly comfortable.”

Professor Lovegood does not share their qualms, it seems, and is stroking its neck. He shrugs, and wonders if he ought to offer to levitate their things up to the castle itself. But no need, Granger – Professor Granger – is already ascending the stairs. He follows, and presumes that the Charms mistress has not forgotten the way. Although you never know.

“No, no! Wait, Hermione, Professor, wait!” she calls, her big gray eyes wide with alarm. She flicks her wand, and her mismatched cases bounce merrily into the air, fluttering away to the main doors like a cloud of butterflies. She dashes towards them, and before he can defend himself, has grasped their hands in her own, and is pulling them back down the stairs. 

“We can’t go up yet! We haven’t stood on the lucky stair!”

“Luna, what are you on about?” Professor Granger is as disconcerted as he is, it seems. He tries to wriggle free of Lovegood’s grip, but she’s stronger than she looks.

“It’s the lucky stair, Hermione! Don’t tell me you don’t know? We need to stand here thirty whole seconds, so we’ll have a marvellously good year.”

“Luna… Luna, I’m sure Professor Snape has much better things to do than –”

“Thirty seconds is hardly any time at all, and even less if you let me count.” She closes her eyes with a serene smile, and they stand there like idiots while she counts back beneath her breath. “…Three, two, one, hurrah!” She swings their arms up, frees their hands, and skips away up the stairs.

“Don’t ask me,” Professor Granger says, out the side of her mouth.

And yet it’s not Professor Lovegood that he sees sitting on the staircase, as summer comes to a close. “Is she contagious, then? Lovegood, I mean.”

Professor Granger smiles up at him, or perhaps she is merely squinting against the sun, and is about to ask him to remove his shadow from her lesson plans. “Anything to give me an edge, I suppose.” She laughs, but it’s a half-hearted sound. “How did you do it? Start teaching, I mean.” When he was so young, she does not say, but he knows what she means. He is not young anymore, so presumably he survived the experience, and she would like to know how he managed the feat.

He doesn’t know why he does it, really. But does he know why he’s done anything? So maybe it doesn’t matter, that he hasn’t got a ready excuse for why he seats himself next to her, close enough that the fabric of her robes occasionally drifts against his leg. “I suppose I should give you the time-honoured advice to begin as you mean to continue, but I recommend you avoid doing that at all costs. You have no idea how you mean to continue, not yet.

No, instead, Professor Granger, you should do two things: One, speak with authority, and two, remember that you can always be nicer later – they’ll resent you if you do it the other way ‘round, and in the event you mellow towards them, they can presume they’ve won you over. Much better for discipline that way.”

She smiles at him, open and ready, and presses a slim hand over his own. “Thank you, Professor Snape. That’s the first thing anyone’s told me that isn’t a terrible platitude, or advice to ‘buck up’.”

He tries to smile back, but knows it’s awkward. Trouble is, he is no good at pretending anything when his chest is clenching the way it is now. “I dare say you’ll manage well. And if you don’t, well, their memories are not quite as long as I’d once feared, so take heart in that.”

He does not leap to his feet and flee, but he does not dally, either. --Except for one moment, when he is about to pass into the entrance. He looks back, sees the breeze snatching at her hair, and catches himself wondering what the riotous mass of it might feel like.

Her first day of teaching, she receives an owl at breakfast. He is watching her surreptitiously, and sees the moment her face lights up, sees her grin blossom out across her countenance. He knows what her note says. _I dropped a phial of Felix Felicis on that step, once._


	6. Epilogue

It’s a cellophane bag of chocolate truffles, he can see that much. A tow-headed little swot who’s been racking up points for Slytherin this year is pressing them into his hands, and insisting that he hopes he’ll “Have a very happy Christmas, Professor Snape!”

“Happy Christmas to you, too, Maberly,” he says, nearly automatically. He hefts the choccies quizzically, and sees that Professor Granger has noticed the exchange. He folds the top of the bag open, and proffers it in her direction. “Want one?”

Her eyebrows raise. “Do you trust that one?” she asks, gesturing at the boy’s departing back as she nevertheless plucks a truffle between forefinger and thumb.

“Not particularly, but I have bezoars on my person.”

Her eyebrows inch higher.

He selects his own candy, and bites into it meditatively. After a moment she follows suit. It’s quite good, really. He licks a bit of cocoa powder from his finger. And notices that Professor Granger is once again staring at him. He raises an eyebrow back at her.

“I’m going to maul you for the rest of those. Thought I should give you fair warning.”

He laughs outright. The sound echoes a long ways in the crisp winter air.

The carillon rings out the notes for ‘Joy to the World’ as the carriages depart, and he realises he is standing on Luna Lovegood’s Lucky Step. He turns to Professor Granger and offers her his arm. “Shall we head up to the staff room, and see if Minerva has a pot of tea on?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Well, I think that’s this holiday creation wrapped up (and unwrapped, too – efficiency!). MyWitch, I appreciate immensely the effort you've gone to in creating nice things for all of us to look at, and for the illustration you created from my prompt. Thank you! To my readers here: If you enjoyed this, my sincere thanks for taking a moment to let me know; to everyone else, thank you for going to the trouble of reading. As always, I welcome any constructive criticism for how this piece could have been improved for you._


End file.
